Sensenbrenner spokesman Jeff Lungren downplays any personal issues between his boss and Ashcroft. "Everyone recognizes that there's always a tension between Congress' interest in getting information and the Department of Justice's -- or any agency's -- general reluctance to share all sorts of information with Congress," he says. Sensenbrenner and Ashcroft have a fine working relationship, Lungren insists, meeting every "six or eight weeks or so."

At last week's hearing, though, Sensenbrenner declared his support for the controversial USA PATRIOT Act to be "neither perpetual nor unconditional." Sensenbrenner, who unlike his Senate counterpart Hatch has sought an aggressive oversight role for his committee, spoke against "short-term gains which ultimately may cause long-term harm to the spirit of liberty and equality which animate the American character." In that spirit, he and others on the House Judiciary Committee had some rather probing questions for the attorney general. Sensenbrenner was most irate about Ashcroft's revision last summer of the so-called Levi guidelines, introduced by Ford administration Attorney General Edward Levi, which prohibited FBI agents from investigating demonstrations and religious services covered by the First Amendment unless "specific and articulable facts" indicated criminal activity. That Ashcroft revised these guidelines with zero consultation with Congress had the chairman most upset.

Others had bones to pick, too. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., was worried about the way the Justice Department was using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Her fellow California Democrat, Rep. Howard Berman, brought forward issues in the inspector general's report about the "hold until cleared" policy -- whereby illegal immigrants are held in custody until it can be proved that they have no terrorist ties, a complete reversal of the judicial system's presumption for American citizens that they're innocent until proved guilty.

"You said in your statement, 'We must not forget that our enemies are ruthless fanatics,'" said Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass. "But the solution is not for us to become zealots ourselves so that we remake our society in the image of those that would attack us."

But regardless of the occasionally heated rhetoric from his congressional inquisitors, nothing seemed as compelling as the life-or-death situations the attorney general was able to describe. Listing the names of victims of 9/11, as well as of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq, the attorney general reminded the panel of the continued threat of terrorism, mentioning a recent fatwa -- "The Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels" -- issued by a Saudi imam with links to al-Qaida. What seemed to get the lion's share of the media's attention was Ashcroft's request for more powers, because, he said, the law "has several weaknesses which terrorists could exploit, undermining our defenses."

Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock says Ashcroft was merely trying to communicate some ideas for follow-ups to the PATRIOT Act, as requested by Congress in January. After an in-house document containing ideas for follow-up legislation to the PATRIOT Act was leaked that month -- the infamous "PATRIOT II" -- members of Congress told the Justice Department that "we want to discuss these things with you when you want to revise the act," she said. "So we're like, Here are some things to start the dialogue back and forth." Comstock doesn't see the proposals as controversial, and she points out that one provision from PATRIOT II was inserted into the Amber Alert bill earlier this year and passed into law: a legal tweak including airplanes in the definition of mass-transit vehicles. Previously, a U.S. district judge had struck down one of the many charges against Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber, ruling that an airplane did not legally constitute a "mass transit" vehicle.

Ashcroft's first proposal would change the 1996 anti-terrorism law against providing material support for a terrorism group to include those who train with terrorists, like the so-called Lackawanna Six. The question about whether the current law, which prohibits providing "personnel" to terrorists, also prohibits providing one's self has prompted different answers from different courts: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling that the prohibition against providing "training" or "personnel" to a designated terrorist group was unconstitutional, the court argued, because the terms weren't "sufficiently clear as to allow persons of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what was prohibited." In July 2002, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III of Virginia disagreed with the 9th Circuit in a ruling against "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, ruling that the statute was not vague, since "personnel" clearly applies to those who put themselves under the "direction and control" of a terrorist organization and "does not extend to independent actors."

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